On December 9th, 2018, on the eve of international Human Rights Day, in my hometown of Chengdu, Sichuan, the most influential house church in China today, the Early Rain Covenant Church, was raided by the police and banned, and more than 100 believers were taken away. The founders of the church, the husband-and-wife pair of Wang Yi and Jiang Rong, were both accused of “inciting subversion of state power”, arrested.

Prior to the official publication of this appeal, it has received the strong support of the sinologists Perry Link、Michael Martin Day and Marie Holzman, the German writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller and writer Martin Shult, director Stephan Knies and of the Berlin Literature Festival, Ulrich Schreiber. Thanks a lot.]

On December 9th, 2018, on the eve of international Human Rights Day, in my hometown of Chengdu, Sichuan, the most influential house church in China today, the Early Rain Covenant Church, was raided by the police and banned, and more than 100 believers were taken away. The chapel, seminary, and other church property funded by the congregants were seized and the property was immediately illegally occupied, becoming the government office hall of the Double Eyes Well Community. The founders of the church, the husband-and-wife pair of Wang Yi and Jiang Rong, were both accused of “inciting subversion of state power”, arrested and have gone missing until this day, leaving their ten-year-old son, Wang Shuya, to be looked after by Wang Yi’s parents. A few days ago, burning with worry, Wang Yi’s father sought out a lawyer for his son. Unexpectedly, just after the two parties had finished their interview, police officers who had been surveilling them rushed up and arrested the lawyer, interrogated him in the police station for six hours, confiscated all related legal documents, and announced he had been stripped of his right to provide counsel.

Wang Yi and I have known each other for 20 years. We are both dissident poets and writers and have both been directors of the Independent Chinese Pen Center. Together, we also published four underground books that have been banned. As I had visa applications to leave the country rejected 16 times, Wang also acted as my human rights lawyer. In 2005, Jiang Rong and Wang Yi were baptized and returned to the Lord. A half year later, Wang Yi, Yu Jie, Li Boguang and other Chinese Christians were received by President Bush in the White House. In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, Wang Yi and his wife founded the Early Rain Covenant Church in their home. Since then, they have been repeatedly harassed by the police and have been interrogated over 20 times. Later, Wang Yi became the chief pastor of the Early Rain Covenant Church and the most controversial "political pastor" among the more than 10 million congregants of China’s underground churches.

Every year on the anniversary of June 4th Massacre, he has held a prayer meeting for the victims of the Tiananmen Massacre, for which he has been repeatedly censured. He has responded: "Many people ask us why we pray for June 4th as it is politics. I say I didn’t see politics, I saw people being killed, an injustice, people being oppressed and suffering. In a politicized society, just maintaining freedom of conscience is already considered political."

On October 28, 2018, he preached: "This country is launching a war against the soul, although the ranking of this war is not the most advanced, it is the most important war. In Xinjiang, in Tibet, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Chengdu, the rulers of this country are launching this war, but they have established for themselves an enemy that can never be detained, can never be destroyed, will never capitulate nor be conquered: the soul of man...so they are destined to lose this war and are doomed to fail..."

He went on to mention the spiritual life, stating that life without spirituality is consequently undignified. He stressed: "Just as the spiritual life is the essence of human life, just as Christian faith is so precious, the one thing we cannot bear to lose, and is even the one treasure we sinners possess [is our spiritual life]; just so, when this country comes to take this sole treasure away, we beseech the Lord to fill us with the Holy Spirit, Amen. We beseech the Lord to let us not only do this, but to also let us use our persecution to convey a gospel of persecution to the society of China. Let them torture themselves in questioning the value their own souls, interrogating their own pitiable, despicable lives; where is dignity, honor and freedom under such a dictatorship of money and absolute power? It is either in Jesus Christ, or there is no dignity at all....."

And, so, Wang Yi was accused of "inciting subversion of state power", and the sentence awaiting him will be no less than that of Liu Xiaobo, who was convicted of the same crime. And as he follows in the glorious path of a martyr, I predict that it can be no less than the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

In this "brainwashing war", or call it a "war of souls," like those of authoritarian tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, etc., God's servants Wang Yi and Jiang Rong have become captives of "this country", just as a decade ago, Liu Xiaobo became a prisoner of "this country" for drafting Charter 08. Wang Yi has stated: "If you tame the rulers in heaven, you cannot tame the dictators on the ground." This young "egg", who is 18 years younger than Liu Xiaobo, is at the turning point of this darkest chapter of Chinese history, similar to the martyred saint Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the Nazi period in Germany, when he openly confronted the "boulder" coming to crush him. At an evangelistic meeting on September 11, 2018, Wang shouted: "We have a duty to tell Xi Jinping that he is a sinner. The government he leads has greatly offended God because it has persecuted the church of our Lord Jesus Christ; if it does not repent, it must perish. We must proclaim that an evil person like him still has a way out. And the only way out is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ... we say this as it is of true benefit to him and China’s rulers: we don't want to see them sinking into hell, being cursed by God..."

In a sermon on the evening of September 21, 2018, he told the more than 500 Christians present: "In the persecution of the Henan House Church, not only was the cross dismantled, but the church was looted, and even the bibles and psalm books were burned. In the China’s history of the twentieth century to the present, this is the fourth burning of the Bible. In 1900, the Boxers burned the Bible and killed Western missionaries, but the Lord at that time prepared a group of local evangelists for the future revival of his church. The second time was the heathen movement of 1922-1927, when the government burned bibles in large numbers; but it was followed by a ten-year renaissance of the Church from 1927 to 1937. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 was the third time China’s rulers burned the Bible and demolished churches; but since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Church of our Lord has had a revival of forty years in length. So, a few days ago someone asked: ‘Pastor Wang, don't you worry that you will go to jail?’ I replied, I don't worry, I just want to know one thing: Is the Lord using this burning and persecution in 2018 to somehow raise up a group of preachers for the church in China? And are some of them congregants of the Early Rain Covenant Church ...... "

In the early spring of 2011, on the eve of my escape across the Sino-Vietnamese border, Wang Yi sent an e-mail to his friends that accurately predicted his own, later calamity. “Going to prison is like going to Africa,” he wrote, “God has given me three brocade purses: the ability to move house at any time, to go to jail at any time, and to return to my heavenly home at any time.”

Seven years later, he finds himself in a cage. A common friend of ours, from our hometown thousands of miles away, mailed me Wang’s four underground poetry collections. Once, I deliberately did not read his writings. I am not a Christian, although I wrote God is Red, a book pirated and praised by Wang Yi as “exalting the Lord”. However, I never subconsciously felt any form of mission or desire to offer praise. Although I will diligently write everything down [that I am told], I am but a tape recorder of an era.

But the "recorder" also bursts into tears, just as I do now as I read Wang’s poems, mulling over "going to prison is like going to Africa" - so far away! So far away!! Can he return? Can I still see him in this life? in this world?

The prison cells of the Communist Party are getting darker and darker. Both Liu Xiaobo and Yang Tianshui have died within them. They were only in their 60s. They were both non-violent dissident writers. As soon as their sentences were almost served, they were suddenly diagnosed to have terminal illnesses… and Wang Yi has chronic gout that is extremely painful whenever it strikes. Will the police who took him "to Africa" let him carry painkillers with him? The next surprise interrogation he is subjected to, an attack of gout can be expected, and as he writhes in pain on the floor, will they send him to the hospital….

Our teacher in this profession, Solzhenitsyn, compared the labor camps all over the Soviet Union to a “gulag archipelago." He described how when a person had not yet entered, the archipelago is like a constellation in the sky, so far away, unfathomable, no one knows how to reach it. Until one day the catastrophe befalls them, and they then realize the only way to get there is through formal arrest. Coming back, or never coming back, no one can tell….

Yes, when I left the birthplace of my nightmares, the gout patient Wang Yi continued to move onward and desperately resisted for seven more years before finally being formally arrested instead of being “asked to tea”, "subpoenaed", "placed under house arrest", "repatriated", "sent on vacation", "gone missing" or "black-hooded". I have a foreboding feeling he will not return! Everyone knows that country and its cities known as Chengdu, Lhasa, Urumqi or Beijing, are secretly filled with political prisoners serving their time. For those who for the time being have yet to enter, they are as remote as the archipelago or Africa.

I am here with an appeal for the poet, writer and pastor Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong. I hope that all Western politicians and poets, writers, scholars, human rights activists and ordinary citizens will pay attention to this confrontation with brainwashing, this resistance in the war of hijacking the souls of China’s people; I hope that German Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Maas will make use of their influence on China to prompt the Xi Jinping regime to release the Wang Yi and Jiang Rong; I also hope President Trump and the US government will link their unprecedented trade wars with human rights and rescue Wang Yi and his wife. I say this because the President put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, and Wang Yi was arrested and imprisoned in protest against the burning of the same Bible.

Of course, I also hope that the Pope and the Vatican, who signed a shameful agreement with the Chinese government not long ago, will repent and publicly propose the release of God's children, Wang Yi and Jiang Rong.

Dear friends, whether we know each other or not, thank you for reading and passing this on. I also hope that you will express what you feel and your conscience in any way you find appropriate, and support this appeal.